


blueprints

by redlight



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Angst, Angst without a happy ending, Character Death, Depression, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, Dubious Science, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Missing Persons, Robot Lance, Robot/Human Relationships, Robots, Science Fiction, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, a Ride, are robots alive? hm, inventor matt, inventor/robot, mad scientist matt holt is my favorite matt holt, missing child, who is leandro espinosa mcclain? not lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-04 10:38:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18341981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redlight/pseuds/redlight
Summary: Matthew Holt is a renowned inventor andmaybe, just maybehe could actually change this shitshow of a world.Instead, he tries to overdose on caffeine, and he sleeps under his computer desk, and he only talks to his own damn robots.Matt Holt is adepressing loser, probably.Maybe that's why he takes the commission to make the stupid companion droid.





	blueprints

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for the OTPlease fanzine and completed in April 2018; the zine has since been published and distributed and also i forgot to post it so uh here have some robot angst 
> 
> uh, warnings for mentions of a missing child and grieving, offscreen character deaths and some REAL dubious robot vs. human politics

_b l u e p r i n t s_

⚠

Matt's life has always been a series of _clicks, clacks, codes_.  
  
It's like, when he's seven years old and his dad says, _Mattie, c'mon, take a look at your sister,_ and he's introduced to teeny tiny _Katie_ who's trying to stick her tongue out at their mom, but she’s mostly just crying, and there’s that _click-clack-scatter_ of nurse shoes vibrating through the hospital air.

When he's nine, and his dad shows him his project, a series of numbers and lines and codes and _the Holt family business is so important, Matt,_ and it _is_ important, it's nationwide and recognized and it's innovation-inspiration-automation at its finest, Holt Automatons are a fine, _fine_ name—  
  
Well, Matt grows up surrounded by clicks and clacks and codes; it lives in his binary-code blood and it’s entwined with the neurons in his skull, and he lives _with_ it, he lives _for_ it, he lives _through_ it.

Matt lives through the disappearance of his precious baby sister and the _cycle-recycle_ of his father going unthreaded and loosened at his seams. Matt lives through the news stories and the alerts and the " _Have you seen this missing girl—_ "

All bright forest-fire eyes who steals Matt's glasses when she's bored and threatens to go blind with them, _Katie Holt_ , fifteen-years-old...

_Fifteen—_

She was too _young_ and Matt's been surrounded by the click-clattering of a terrible television set about to combust and the shattered glasses in the sink from the shaky hands of his mother and the way his father represses and locks himself away in this lab, the stupid fucking _family lab_ —

But his precious baby sister is gone and disappeared and—

And Matt's head's been a static of lines and clicks ever since.

⚠

His father isn't dead yet, hasn't overworked himself from stress and grief from trying to rebuild his daughter like she once was, with pretty forest fire eyes and a wit sharper than knives—the kind of things praised when a little girl is dead, and derided when she's a high school student who's too sassy and back talks too much and never follows the course curriculum 'cause she's always been too damn smart for it.

Anyway, Matt's father locks up. Shuts down. Family lab is closed for business—

Except the _business_ isn't closed for business, no.

This is where Matt, three years into finishing his Masters in Robotic Engineering and Artificial Intelligence Mechanics, this is where _Matthew Holt_ comes into play like he's a person on his own and not another depressive, tragic _Holt_ —except that’s exactly what he is.

So he runs the business, now.

And maybe—okay, maybe it's the worst thing he could've done.

⚠

Matt lives his life in taps, clicks, and clacks. The dreary pick and drop of a pen as he flips it up into the air and it lands back in his palm. The clattering of keyboard keys when he finally forces himself to write another line of useless, worthless, meaningless code. The meager thump of his socked feet against the carpet and the _click-clack-hiss_ of opening an over-sweet soda can, just to rot his teeth a little more.

And the thing is, he's _got_ his robots, the automatons for service jobs and construction and he's got that massive, _massive_ set of super soldiers, which makes him snort and think about old movies with winter soldiers or whatever.

But—

He gets the commission for the _companion bot_ , then, at _some_ unspecified point, because time is dreary and confusing. It’s _euphemistic_ , for people who are _lonely_ , in want of a partner in their life and their bed and their head, _that’s what you use a companion bot for_ , and it’s kind of sickening, but...

But—

—he works on it anyway.

He needs something to do, after all.

So, whatever.

⚠

Matt actually blueprints it out.

When he was a kid, this is what Dad would do, because Katie thought it was fun. Matt remembers this vividly, like dreams of carnival candy are vivid, like memories of rocket popsicles melting in summer sunshine and cling-sticking to fingers are vivid. Like false recollection is more real than memory.  
  
( _'Cause humans, they don't recall things properly, not like machines can, can never record an accuracy for the sake of their own fucking human lives_ —)  
  
Just another human flaw.

But yeah, Matt remembers. He remembers it like people remember throwing up on a roller-coaster after gorging themselves on popsicles and funnel cake. He remembers it like being in third grade and having this high school kid with a shitty smile and a shitty hat and a shitty malice in his eyes coming up close and choking the life out of your fragile, puny breathing neck—

Windpipes are so important yet so _breakable_ ; just another flaw of human design.

But, the point is, Matt used to be a shitty high school kid and he used to have a cute little sister with big buck-teeth and wild faerie hair. And he used to laugh a little too loudly and throw his arm around his tiny little fair folk sister and ruffle the hell out of her fiery hair as she whined and swatted at his face as she tried to make her own drawings.

Their dad would start off sentimental, with a purpose clearly written and outlined on his precious blueprints, _this robot will be Katie's friend, this robot will be Katie's companion—Matt, won't you help build it?_

It's vivid like the smile you give after losing your lunch in a shitty bumper car ride, but have to take a picture anyway because you're at the amusement park and Mom needs you to _try_ to look happy, just for _once_ , please, don't ruin this trip—

But yeah, well—they built a robot.

It took months, and, and _really_ it was Dad’s work. It was _his_ algorithms and adjustments and designs, but he let Matt and Katie build it up, a big, sturdy soldier bot they called _Shiro_ who’s still around to tell Matt to sleep, sometimes.

When Matt was a kid, a tiny kid like Pidge used to be (‘ _Cause listen to me Katie, you're like a tiny little faerie and you've gotta have a faerie nickname, right?_ and she'd just nod and go with it, bless her tiny five-year-old soul—)

That’s when Matt used to blueprint.

And then Matt was a preteen and then Matt was a shitty high schooler and it's all the _same_ , really, his cells build and die and rebuild and self-destruct and recycle all over again, it's all the same matter in the universe and dead star dust anyway, it's all the same even if the cells change, just think about it _differently_ —

So, the day Matt's father dies, overworked to the bone and blood by his pet project, his _Katie_ project, a fifteen-year-old to be resurrected with software and wires instead of cells because _it's all the same dead star dust, anyway, she'll be the same, even as an AI, replicas are the same_ , well, Matt sits under his shitty-creaky-wobbly computer desk with the breaking keyboard and the sad picture of Mom beside it, and—

Maybe Matt cries, but he can't really remember.

He does remember the funeral, he guesses, in some state of numb and shock where he registered that the sky was the same color as Katie's funeral. Bright orange sunset beauty and he thanks the God he doesn't believe in every damn day for that, that it's that beautiful color and the green grass wasn't dead from summer overheat yet—

(—was her favorite color green? She liked pink when she was tiny, maybe, or maybe she didn't, but she's always in pink in the family photos until she was twelve and green and bright like fresh new tree leaves, and she ran to school with grass behind her ears and she glued insect wings into her hair and their mother _screeched_ about it but Pidge laughed like _crazy_ about it and it was _everything_ _._ )

Anyway, Matt blueprints, like he's a kid again, like he’s a middle schooler. Like he’s fifteen like his sister is alive like his father is alive like his mother isn't so dead, and he brainstorms and clatters on his keyboard and suddenly...

A week after the funeral, he gets his dad's office chair. His dad’s desk. Office, corporation, _Holt Automation_ , it's _his_ now and it makes Matt's soda-stained teeth click together and it makes the _sticky-sweet of rocket popsicles_ and the _baby hands holding onto his_ all feel too fucking—

 _Vivid_.

It's the same day he gets a commission for a goddamn _companion robot_ , though.

And he actually fucking _does it_.

⚠

Matt blueprints it, and he can't resist the joke, so the bot's gonna be blue.

Sky blue and smooth, calm, the opposite of a rageful sunset. Clear cyan and encapturing.

" _You need someone to talk to_ ," says Allura, the company lawyer, so Matt digs up the original code Dad used to program his bots to speak, and he builds on it.

" _You're not doing so well, man, do you need to talk about it?_ " says Hunk, from the engineering team, so Matt stays up all night and enters instruction after instruction and stays alive on caffeine and tries to forget the color orange ( _or was it green, or was it pink, or was it—_ )

So, Matt makes the bot talk.

Its voice is glitchy as hell, first of all. It's got a body made of binary code, made out of the vibration of sound waves in the air Matt breathes, and it lives in the microscopic dead skin cells covering Matt’s keyboard, in the stale air inside the many crumpled soda cans on the floor.

It _lives_ , it's too real not to live. Maybe it's not alive, but it's taking little pieces of Matt’s soul and reanimating them in pyrotechnics and stellar plasma fluid, red and blue and _not green and not orange and not pink_.  
  
So, thing is, Matt tends to deal with this weight of anxiety in the undersides of his soda-ridden stomach. It's ever-present and it pushes up on his gag reflex, like he’s gonna _retch-vomit—_ but it never ever comes. Maybe it’s because he drinks too much goddamn cola and it rots his teeth and his stomach lining from the inside-out, but, whatever.

Everyone’s allowed a vice, and now Matt has a new one.

And, yeah, sure, maybe his vice is overwork and obsession, _but—_

It’s his job. He’s getting paid for it. He’s got _reason_ , and he’s gotta pay the rent, and he’s gotta buy Mom her groceries, and—

Well, that’s when he ends up picking up newspaper articles. Newspaper articles from _ages ago_ , they don't use paper no more, it's been _decades_ but they keep newspaper archives in libraries still.

Well, he's looking for a face. A face for his robot.

He's flipping through thumbed-down, never-read newspapers, photos full of corpses, the faces of people dead from a decade ago.

He and Pidge did this, for the AI project they helped Dad with. It was a young guy, a pilot who was part of that historic failure of a mission to Kerberos, died when the shuttle shattered, when miscalculations led the shuttle into a floating bit of space debris.

 _Takashi Shirogane_.

They took his face.

He's a robotic soldier, now. A _marvel_ , a _model_ , a _miracle_ , the numerous _Shiro_ models used heavily in military training and instruction. ( _They took a dead man’s face, used scalpels and_ took his face— _reanimated it for their own use_.)

Matt’s fingers land against a new face in the newspapers.

 _Leandro Espinosa McClain_.

Cute kid. Blue eyes and massive grin, toothy, wild and shiny.

Fighter pilot in the 2020s. Crashed and burned like a set of firecrackers reacting too soon.

 _Tragedy of the decade_.

Matt isn’t _remaking_ him. Sure as hell isn’t gonna use the same name for him.

But when he grafts a dead kid’s face onto a carbon-nanotube, micro-titanium skeleton, circuitry and fiber optics instead of skin and flesh—

Okay, no, Matt can't reuse a dead kid’s name, no matter _what_ he uses his face for posthumously.

(Is it so bad, that Matt picks a new name?)

⚠

A few facts about this AI: he fucking _talks_.

Toothy, wild and shiny.

Sassy, wild, static-grit voice.

Matt fell asleep on his keyboard once—eyes weary, head dreary, heartbeat slow and stubborn and _sucky, to be honest_.

The space behind his eyes hurts. The scar he bit through his lip stings with the acidity of cola caffeine. His blood is rushing with sugar, but dizzy-bleary with fatigue.  
  
Sleep overtakes you like this. _Three, two, one_ , three seconds and you’re exhausted, two seconds and you’re fading, one second you're alive and breathing and smiling, lost in the woods, hide and seek and childhood dreams, love and peace and security, it's all this and that and _if you wanna be a space explorer, Mattie, then you can be—_  
  
If you wanna build your friends, Mattie, that's exactly what you can do.  
  
If you wanna drown in caffeine and never sleep and never speak to your disintegrating mother, that's what you can do.  
  
If you wanna _work-work-work_ , Mr. Workaholic, then make sure your bones are sturdy from all that childhood calcium and _drink milk every day, Katie, so you'll be taller than Matt one day_ , well.  
  
Then you better fuckin' work, nerd.  
  
If your only friend is made of binary code and command-functions, then, y'know.  
  
You must be living life right _enough_.  
  
Matt Holt? He's fine.  
  
He's not the point.  
  
The point of the industry is _creation affectation innovation._  
  
And Lance, _god_ , he's an innovation

Blueprint schemes made his color out to be blue; that's the color of his application icon on Matt’s computer screen, it's just a blue dot like the planet Earth from afar, it's just a blue dot like the centuries-old symbol for intoxication before they used the skull-and-bones to mean _death, death, this is death_.  
  
But this AI— _Lance_ , Matt’s calling him Lance, 'cause he's sharp, 'cause he's smart, 'cause he _talks—_  
  
Wild, bright, toothy, sassy.  
  
_Shiny and new_.  
  
It starts because Matt's falling asleep while he works—because Matt is _always_ falling asleep as he works. Because Matt's dead-asleep in his soul and in his rotting, sawing bones, sweltering in the heat that all his office hardware emits, buzzing alight with LED and _forgot-to-fix-the-fire-alarm_ batteries, use 'em for something _else_ , something _better_ —  
  
Matt's head hits the keyboard and the speakers go static-frantic-wired.  
  
" _T_ _ch—Hey, man, wh-what the hell_?"  
  
_What the hell_ is right _._  
  
The voice is unfamiliar, _not right_ , makes Matt jerk up because who the _fuck_ is in his house, who the _fuck_ is after his tech—  
  
But yesterday he set up the voice activation commands, yesterday he set up the reactions his bot's gotta make in response to stimuli like the thump of a head hitting the keyboard, that's why he even _installed_ these speakers, of course—  
  
Oh, that's why.  
  
"Lance," Matt says out, shakily, testily. "Can you hear me?"  
  
He's gotta bring his mic closer to his face. He's gotta stop his shaking. He's gotta stop drinking so much trash, to be real honest, but—  
  
Caffeine has the same intense, heavy concentration in Lance's creation as it does in Matt's weary, tired blood. That is to say, _a whole fucking lot_.  
  
But this is fine.  
  
_This is fine_.

⚠

Matt's made an AI bot physical before, with Shiro. With some more minor projects. Now he's got his one Shiro roaming round the house tryna get him to _sleep_ , so, there's _him_.

Shiro's body is huge—big buff tall, 'cause he's a soldier, an instructor, he's warm and sturdy in every equal measure. A good replica, if enhanced from the real person, but _god_ , the real person's dead, so what's it matter?  
  
Same deal with Lance. He's not _Leandro,_ but he's got Leandro's skin color, got that striking eye color, 'cause it's cold and blue but makes him look _warmer_ and a companion service bot's gotta look approachable, doesn't it?

Gotta be warm.

Warm skin, warm eyes, loud, loud mouth that won't _shut up_...  
  
Okay, new problem. Lance likes talking. Likes stretching out his word vocabulary, testing the bounds of his internal dictionary. Well, he's a bot, and he doesn't have _emotions_ but, y'know, yeah. Bots will just go ahead and do their own shit sometimes.  
  
But that means Lance has to talk with a _mouth_ , so Matt has to adjust that mouth to look _human_ , since it's gonna be too fucking _unsettling_ if Lance constantly tries to open it and it _doesn't open_. Or, even worse, if it opens into unempty blackness and circuitry.  
  
It'd be fuckin' creepy, okay?  
  
So Matt fixes the mouth, goddammit. He's not a weird fucking fetishist, swear to God, swear to his father's dying company.  
  
He just had to do this, okay?  
  
But uploading the bot to the body is the easiest task. And Lance is, well.

Lance is a _marvel._  
  
Matt keeps saying it. It keeps being true.  
  
The prototype name isn't changed, _Lance_ is fine. But this is still prototype 1, work in progress, first draft, _incomplete incomplete_.  
  
But man, can he talk.  
  
Lance, when he gets off Matt's lab table (his dad thought it was funny, a _lab table_ , but it's easiest to lay out circuitry on and build upwards from there, it makes _sense_ to Matt's soda-addled mind, alright? So it's a silly lab table, like Matt is Frankenstein with a taste for making monsters. So it's silly like Matt's pretending to play God even though God doesn't care to exist, so _what_ if it's _silly_?)  
  
Anyway.

Lance? Blue eyes outfitted with cameras and high-quality visual sensors. Interesting, interesting, so goddamn _interesting_.

Lance rises up from the lab table like the monster Matt's tried to create, and he's—

Really, the point is, Matt takes pride in his craftsmanship.

Is it narcissism, then, if he thinks Lance is gorgeous enough to ruin him?

Is it narcissism, when he's constructed that fine-sturdy bone structure with duct tape, carbon fiber, his own exhaustion? When he created that mouth in a whole night, researching for _hours and hours and hours_ to find a suitable printable model for the 3D scanner?

Well. If blue eyes are mirrors and Matt's in love with his reflection, then maybe he needs more fuckin’ help than he thought.

Like a good service bot, Lance sits up on Matt’s kiddie-show Frankenstein counter. Wiggles his fingers in front of his face, apprehensive and new and _curious, curious_ , like blue planets are, like Mars rovers are.

Winces—mechanical motion and wire-whirring, _click-clack-shutter_ of camera-lens eyelashes. Testing his facial expressions out, _twitch-grind-gear_ of teeth. He smiles, too. _Smiles_.

It should fall into the uncanny valley, to be brutally honest, because Lance is _uncanny, uncanny_ , not Leandro anymore—but his smile is new like how innovation and the frontier of scientific exploration is—an exoneration of old ideas, an introduction of new concepts and new ways to identify beauty and—

Curious, _curious_ , gorgeous, _gorgeous_.

(Well, Matt’s probably a fucking narcissist, then.)

Matt’s glad he worked on that mouth long enough, if he gets a smile like that, ignoring how wretched and perverted that whole thing sounds, of course.

(Lance is gonna be a service bot, _companion bot_ , people will misuse him _horribly._ )

He's lovely, lovely, too lovely.

And just a first prototype.

The point is, Matt is a mess. An absolute disaster. A trainwreck disguised as a human being, a human being who pretends to be real.

He’s a _mess_.

He’s gonna screw this up, he knows it.

⚠

Lance _talk-talk-talks_.

Matt sets him up to do basic, simple tasks at first, shit Pidge would've loved, to be honest, if he's willing to put his rotting heart into another hole and _admit it admit it_ , because she rigged Shiro to say digits of pi for three days straight until his memory capacity was shot to hell and their entire server went down, but, well, yeah. Yeah.

Lance gets to say a _different_ string of numbers careening on for irrational infinity.

Lance talk-talk-talks, and at first it's irrational numbers, like—

"Alright, Lance— _Lance_ , please, stop looking at the keyboard—no, it's sticky 'cause I spilled coffee on it, not because I—yes, Lance, I take sugar with my coffee—Lance! I have a request."  
  
" _S_ _ure th-th-thing, boss-man! What's your favor now, huh? Need me to search up pics of your hunky-lookin' engineering fr-fr-friend? Tch—yeah! His name was Hunk! You like him, right? That's way more fun than-–_ "  
  
Matt sighs, ‘cause he’s _gotta_ do the diagnostic. "Recite the digits of tau."  
  
"— _Reciting the digits of tau. 6.2831—tch, Matt! No! Inventor-man, not cool, no way, that's_ boring— _85307—you're the w-w-worst—17958—ugh!_ "  
  
His speech is riddled with tick-tack-tremors and glitching, switching stutters, but Lance is—  
  
Matt could listen to that voice all day. Or night, case may be, since his eyes are dreary-exhausted and his fingers are shaking from caffeine overuse again.  
  
Even if Lance is reciting numbers, though— _tau because Katie always used to argue that tau was more useful in equations than pi was—_ well, Matt could listen to that voice for a damn long time if he were stuck and bottled and jarred in a coffin. It'd be a sweet thing to die to, glitches and all.  
  
" _Tch—64769—_ "  
  
Soothing enough that Matt falls asleep on his keyboard.  
  
But, to be honest, that happens too damn often, these days.

⚠

Lance is so, _so_ goddamn endearing.

Like—so, okay, Matt’s house is empty, it's a shitty-dreary apartment with mess everywhere, and Lance _roams_.  
  
—Curiosity like humans, curiosity like rovers.  
  
But Lance likes to investigate. He likes to perch up on Matt's little-used kitchen counter, thumbing through the cabinets, blue eyes wide and absorbing every new speck and shimmer of information.  
  
" _-Matt, inventor-man_ ," Lance starts off, peeking out behind a cabinet door with his mouth pursed in thought-processes and analytical function. " _Tch—what's that_?"  
  
Matt glances up from the coffee machine. His teeth feel gross, he probably should've brushed them today, but it's not like _Lance_ could judge him. It's not like Lance could _sniff_ him or anything, god—  
  
But, yeah. Lance is giving him that big blue planet Earth stare again.  
  
" _What are th-th-these_?"  
  
"Those—" Matt squints. He didn't put his contact lenses on yet, it's just a habit, so. "That's a mug, Lance, that should be in your database."  
  
" _Oh_!" Lance pauses for a second, tell-tale _re-evaluate re-analyze reassess_. " _You're r-right, tch—sorry, I had a blank-out moment, I guess. Need some maintenance, y-y-y'know_?" And matched with that shiny-flutter grin—  
  
Matt can't help but grin back too. And Lance just kicks his feet a little bit more, barefoot because, well, Lance can't feel temperature. Matt's own feet are wrapped in two pairs of soft, fluffy socks, so. At least Lance doesn't have to deal with the _freezing cold floor_.  
  
But Lance reaches up to grab a mug from the cupboard. A cute green one, makes Matt stutter and stop for a second because _green._  
  
It's not hers, though. Not from when Pidge started her caffeine habit a little too early, like, at age thirteen maybe? Following a little _too_ closely in Matt's footsteps, it was kinda cute, actually...  
  
But. No. It's not hers. Hers was nerdy, had a little robot design on it. Matt must've gotten this one from somewhere else, he guesses, but it's held carefully and delicately in Lance's synthetic-strong hands.  
  
" _Th-this color's real—tch—pretty. I like it_ ," he says, and Matt's not _terribly_ sure if Lance really knows what he likes or is just _acting_ like he knows what he likes, but—  
  
It's adorable either way.  
  
"Yeah?" Matt asks, feeling the bags under his eyes shift a bit when he gives Lance a smile. God, he must look _tired_ , must look like garbage disposal _trash_ , and the furrow in Lance's fiber optic eyebrows tells him Lance thinks so, too.

Well, if Lance _really_ thinks, Matt’s not sure, but, _whatever_. Whatever.  
  
_"Yeah_! _"_ Lance gives him that. Maybe this is sappy, but it really _is_ like a beam of sunlight, god, Matt's heart is going through global warming _already_ , isn't it? _"Tch—it's nice_!"  
  
Lance sets the cup back down on the counter. Except, he underestimates his strength—because carbon-titanium is _strong_ , Matt made _sure—_ and, well.  
  
Lance smashes the mug on the counter.  
  
The way his eyes widen and his mouth just stops _moving_ for a second, like Lance is experiencing his own internal blue screen; it _shouldn't_ be funny, but Matt can't help but bark out a short burst of laughter.  
  
" _I am—tch—I'm so s-sorry, Matt, inventor-man, I didn't—_ "  
  
Lance is _flustered._ He's moving his fingers nervously, tapping them out in a _zero-one-zero-one-zero-zero-zero-one-one-zero-one_ kinda pattern, it's—  
  
Adorable. It's actually adorable.  
  
Matt keeps snickering behind his coffee cup, 'til Lance is climbing off the counter and landing with his bare feet right in the shattered porcelain shards on the floor with a _click-clack-crunch_. Matt winces.  
  
"Lance, you okay?"  
  
Lance blinks, click-shutter. " _I_ _d-don't have nerve endings_." It's not funny, but Lance snickers, as though imitating Matt’s laughter from earlier. " _Tch—I don't feel anything, boss-man, re-remember_?"  
  
Right.  
  
Fuck.  
  
Global warming is halted, ice is creeping up back over Matt's soul and warmth is drained-drained-drained.

‘Cause Lance, _Lance_ really is...

Just a bot.

A commissioned bot. Companionable and charismatic and approachable, just like the client wanted.

⚠

Modern marvel miracle Lance.

Beautiful, innovational, inspirational, just—

_He's supposed to be a fucking prototype._

And Matt just _can't sell_ his beautiful, precious prototype.

He doesn't wanna, and he doesn't know how to _tell_ anyone 'bout it, how to _reason it out_ . How Lance wrinkles his synthetic-fiber nose when he's confused, it's _cute-cute-cute_ , so damn cute, it makes Matt's husk of a titanium heart stutter-static- _stammer_ until his tear ducts well up and his throat closes tight-shut because _Dad would've been so proud, Katie would've loved him so much_ —

Lance bitches whenever Matt runs the Tau diagnostic, Lance back talks and back-sasses with blueprint eyes alight with LED and faerie folk ideas. Lance’s mouth is too _soft_ and he’s too _bright_ , Lance has his sharp-edged wires and circuitry entwined with every blood vessel in Matt’s body at this point, and Matt _can’t just..._

 _Matt can't sell his model off_.

But Lance is a commission—of course he is, a _commission_ , but he's too _real_ and too fuckin' _close_ to being human that it just twists Matt's stomach around and around like a carousel of horror, guts and circuits.

God, Matt fucked up, didn't he?

It was just supposed to be a _blueprint_.

But in Matt’s life, well—he guesses that his blueprints never have a happy end, anyway.

⚠

_end._


End file.
